Classic haunts

A new staging of the Gothic ghost story The Woman in Black opens in Dubai, so what has gripped audiences for 20 years?

David Seddon as the actor and James Clarkson as Arthur Kipps in The Woman in Black.

Like many good things, the stage version of The Woman in Black came into being almost by accident. In 1987, Robin Herford, then the artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in the British seaside town of Scarborough, was scratching around for a show to fill a three-and-a-half week hole in the Christmas schedule. His resident playwright, the late Stephen Mallatratt, suddenly remembered a book he had read on a beach in Greece which had chilled and scared him even though the sun was out and he was surrounded by happy holiday makers.

The only problem was that the novel, by Susan Hill, had 12 characters and numerous scene changes. Herford had a budget of £1,000 (Dh5,000), enough for only four actors and hardly any set. Mallatratt's solution was ingenious. He turned the book into a two-hander (a play featuring only two actors), and set it in an empty theatre. Now, The Woman in Black is a fixture on London's theatre scene. Its two decades in the Fortune Theatre place it behind only Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap as the country's longest-running play. It has been on numerous world tours, and today, it opens in a brand new staging in Dubai.

Before his death in 2004, Mallatratt looked back on the play's progress with obvious pleasure: "It's one of those happy things that happen in one's life that you get a good idea." As John Payton, the director of the Dubai production, points out, part of the reason for the show's phenomenal success is that "there is nothing quite like it. I can't think of another play that has that mix of drama and thrills".

On paper, it is deceptively simple. An old man employs an actor to help him tell a tale of "terrible things" which he wants to recite in an attempt to rid himself of nightmares. It is a story of something that happened to him as a young lawyer when he was sent to an isolated house to sort through a dead client's papers. As the two men begin to enact the events, the audience is drawn into a petrifying vortex of horror. The screams start 20 minutes in; by the second act, complete strangers are grasping each other in terror, calling out and hiding their heads in their hands. It is unbelievably frightening - and haunting in more than one sense.

But - and this is its secret- the means by which the extraordinary tale unfolds are amazingly simple. This is theatre at its most primitive: a few props, the occasional change of clothes, sound effects, music and light. And, of course, words. Hill, the novelist, is a dab hand at creating mystery (in recent years she has written a successful series of dark stories featuring Detective Chief Inspector Simon Serrailler), and has always admired the classic English ghost story. So when she sat down to write her narrative in 1982 in the traditional English style, she made a list of "ingredients".

They included a ghost ("not a monster or a thing from outer space but the ghost of a human who was once alive"), a haunted house, and weather: "fog, mist, snow, and of course moonlit darkness on clear nights". On the page, she describes each of these effects in prose that is both concise and dramatic; Mallatratt's cleverness was to use these descriptive passages virtually unchanged in his adaptation, so the Gothic shape of a house at the end of a narrow causeway, or the sea mist that swirls in unexpectedly, blanking out the landscape, is conjured in the mind's eye. Language paints the pictures that the staging cannot provide.

Payton explains: "The best thing about the play is that it allows the audience to use its imagination. Its overall effect is to make you think you are there. It is very involving. From the first moment, you are hooked. A man walks on stage and he's troubled and there is a story to tell. So you know exactly what is going on and it cleverly tells the story bit by bit, like a proper mystery does." Indeed, many teachers explain the workings of drama to their students by a study of the play. It is almost exemplary in its structure: an introduction that drops mysterious hints of terrors to come is followed by a narrative that ratchets up tension to such a pitch that each revelation is more frightening than the last. By the end, the audience hardly knows whether it wishes to stay seated or flee in fear.

"It's a bit like a roller-coaster ride in a fairground where you know what's coming but don't know how to approach it," says Payton. "Everyone says they don't think they can stomach it. But they go and have the time of their lives." As such, The Woman in Black has few equivalents in modern theatre. There are ghosts - in Hamlet, Macbeth, Arnold Ridley's rarely performed The Ghost Train and Noël Coward's perennially popular Blithe Spirit, for example. And there are horrors, both Gothic (as in Sweeney Todd) and more mundane (as in the stage version of Stephen King's Misery.)

In terms of sheer, supernatural eeriness, The Woman in Black's nearest equivalent is another ghost story adapted from a novel: Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, which is best known as a Benjamin Britten opera, but which also was dramatised under the title The Innocents. Yet in spite of superficial similarities - an isolated house, a sceptical outsider - the basic thrust of the two tales is different. The Turn of the Screw pivots on the question of whether the ghosts are real or imagined. In the case of The Woman in Black, there is no such doubt.

For Dr Catherine Hindson, a historian of 19t- century performance, and a lecturer in performance studies at Bristol University, the play's most obvious precursors are the phantasmagoria shows of spectral illusion that were popular at the end of the 18th century. These involved the apparent conjuring of spirits. "Someone like Etienne-Gaspard Robertson would take his audience into places like old convents and create a scenario, take them through various spaces and then into the room where he was going to bring the phantasmagoria. Then, using the precursor of the magic lantern, he would 'conjure' up apparitions that could move, and frame them within a narrative so that people would not know whether what they were watching was real or unreal, science or art, life or not life."

Later, novels such as The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins and Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon were adapted for the stage. They also involve "bodies that are almost spectral and inhabit the margins", Hindson says. The Woman in Black both fits into this tradition and moves away from it. It is what makes it so unusual. "It distils the horror, the visceral thrill of the Gothic and the sensation drama and strips it down to its bare bones," Hindson says. "What it does is play with the ideas of the real and the intangible, the not real and the intangible, within a very simple space and a simple creation of atmosphere.

"It plays, too, with the theatre's ability to create a space where you feel safe, and yet sometimes you can be taken to the boundaries of that space." Such explorations of the uncanny work surprisingly well in the theatre because it seems impossible to escape from your seat. You have made a deal and you have to see it through. "There's an interchange between people that leads to the creation of fear," Hindson says. "You can create that within a community of people."

In the Fortune Theatre in London, that claustrophobic hysteria is immediately noticeable. Everyone knows that this is a terrifying play, but they don't know exactly how it will scare them. (Indeed, one of the most remarkable things about The Woman in Black's long run is that no one has ever quite given away the secrets of how it works.) As the drama progresses, such anticipation is fed by shock after shock and a searing final twist. For Payton, even rehearsing the play has been unsettling. "It sends a shiver down the spine," he says.

His new production, starring David Seddon and James Clarkson, has a visually stunning new set and different effects than the original. "That's a 20-year-old production," he says. "This is our chance to pull it to pieces and see what makes it tick. It's scary enough in London, but we are going to go the extra mile. We're looking for new moments to really work the audience. It will be even darker, if that's possible."

It is hard to imagine anything more alarming than the London production. But one thing is sure: The Woman in Black will continue holding audiences in its thrall for as long as it is staged, thanks to the brilliance of its storytelling and the power of the imagination.